Manifesto is a curious genre that is based on an internal paradox. It is a text that wants to be an action. How can this be possible? It needs to find the right form (rhetoric, outline, structure, focalization) that would give its ideas and its content agency.
Literary scholar Martin Puchner[1] uses the notion of performativity (the ability of language to produce effects in the world as if they were actions) to describe this aspect of manifestos. The rhetoric of these dense texts is based on impatience ― "...the manifesto will always remain a split second removed from the actual revolution itself". The issue is that when it comes to written texts, they face the risk of being not performative but theatrical, being limited to making a pretentious pose without provoking any difference.
Now, there are manifestos and there are manifestos. With the rise of the internet, a new context emerged to host this genre. Manifestos for the internet are mainly published online (instead of in print) and address the medium in which they exist. There were no wave of manifestos about Gutenberg’s machine when printing was invented, and television manifestos (e.g., the Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement) were not made to be shown on TV. But the internet is a publishing infrastructure, and since the late 1980s, more than a hundred manifestos have been published on the internet about the internet. In this new context, does it still make sense to talk about performative (or theatricality) as means that bind form and content, text and action?
As a printed text, a manifesto can be performative by, for example, speaking as if representing the unity of people, even if it doesn’t exist as a united social group or subculture at the moment of publication (e.g., the proletariat, futurists, cyberfeminists, hackers, cypherpunks).
As an online object, a manifesto has a different agency. It is not only a text, but to some extent - a media forms. It exists in a certain graphic interface, can be structured through subpages or hyperlinked, it can be dynamic or interactive. Starting with forms that are very similar to printed leaflets in their layout (Hacker Manifesto (1986), Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996)), manifestos then develop self-reflexivity about format and interface.
The #TwitterEthics Manifesto (2014) pushes the idea that, “Twitter and New Media journalism, the internet and technology involves all of us” followed by an appeal, “Cite us, ask us to write, get our permission”. In accordance with this idea, the manifesto itself is organized as a saturated hypertext, where 28 links lead to people whose ideas inspired this statement, certain Twitter threads (discussions), academic texts, and blog posts, allowing the reader to jump between different related texts and perceive the text as a collage of sources, exploring them simultaneously. This also addresses the idea of collective authorship; the format shows how the mentioned collectivity can be approached on a practical level.
Similarly, “Manifesto for a critical approach to the user interface” (2015) argues that the graphic user interface should not try to hide the economical, ideological and metaphorical systems on which it is based. Manifesto is published through MediaWiki, whose interface is not hiding its “backstage” and is generally trying to be accessible to work with.
“Internet manifesto” by Sadgrl (2023, older version) stands for opposing big platforms by creating personalized online spaces for yourself and people you want to be in touch with. This text works as a toolkit, with practical steps and a list of links for etiquette principles, software, design elements and tutorials.
While being far away from radical experiments on form/content, they nevertheless bear a resemblance to well-known manifesto examples and an urge to practice new ways of imagining techno*social relationship. Doing things with more than just words, these internet manifestos are not performative or theatrical, as they don’t strike a pose by writing as if the desired world is already happening. Instead, they model the desired. They are utopian thinking applied practically, through examples and toolkits for moved readers. In this curious way, manifestos can suddenly actually happen to be the techno*social relationship they desire. index.php?title=Category:Content form
- ↑ Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.